Read-Aloud Plays eBook

VERA

JEAN

What do you feel?

VERA

I wondered, afterward, what it really was. He
seemed to impress me like a powerful motor car stalled
in a muddy road.

JEAN

Ah. I know!

VERA

Poor child.

JEAN

No. You don’t understand, I was
unhappy, in the ordinary sense, unbelievably so.
But that wasn’t all. I was alive! I
lived as the man lives who faints in the dark mine
underground, and I lived as the aviator lives, thrilling
against the sun, and as the believer in a world of
infidels. That was what he did for me.
And slowly, as I learned how deeply the very pain
was making me live, I put my unhappiness by. It
was there, but it no longer seemed important.
It was the lingering complaint of my old commonplace
soul standing fearfully on the brink of greater things
and hating the situation that led it there.

VERA

You are a big woman, Jean.

JEAN

No, I am a small woman in front of a big thing.
One of the biggest, genius. And the force of
it, relentless as nature, made me what I am. Paul.
Oh, Vera, when I think of his music, tempestuous as
the sea, healing as spring.... And now where
is it? He had what all the world wants most,
flight, and the world stalled him in its own
mud. You saw it.... That’s why I shall
stay here. It’s the only place with his
atmosphere. All these things are he.
I face them here in silence, and I bare my breast
to the arrow. Here I am, the only one who knows
Paul’s music in its possibility. To the
rest, it is a heap of stones by the roadside.
The architect is dead.

VERA

But didn’t he ever ... why didn’t he...?

JEAN

You ask it, of course. You have the right.
Sometimes I ask it, too, why Paul never succeeded.
While we were struggling along, the things that held
him back seemed only details. Only now do I see
them as a whole.

In the first place, Paul never aimed directly at success.
He was all-round. If it had been merely a question
of exploiting his talent, sticking to the one idea
day in, day out, never letting an opportunity slip
by of meeting the right people and getting to the right
places ... that would have been easy. He had
tremendous energy. I used to grudge his interest
in other things. I hated to see him lose the chances